Friday Link Pack: 2/5/16

Welcome to another week of the Friday Link Pack. Last week LiamWrites handled it, and I think we are in the posting routine now – he posted while flopping around a turbulent airplane. This week was a pretty busy one for me, but I did manage to get my feelers on some interesting tidbits.

Blogging

How to Write Super Shareable Content for Your Author Blog by Lauren SapalaThis is a great, succinct article which deals with some common misconceptions most amateur bloggers make. I am quite guilty of using very poetic, esoteric titles for my blog posts and, after reading this, I understand how doing so can be a detriment to my traffic. I have made an effort this year to keep a very consistent naming convention with my blog post titles, and I am happy to see that my intuition was supported by Lauren’s wisdom and advice. This is a quick post with immediate, actionable content to help you strengthen your blogging.

Writerlings

How to Write for the Market by Carly Watters
This is a great post about the pros and cons of writing for a market or trend. Carly shows us reasons to avoid writing for a market and one of her points really stuck out to me. I have never taken the time to stop and think about the actual process of selling a book (as I am quite far away from that stage of my career), and the idea that a market is set two years in advance is sort of mind boggling to me. Hopefully the Fantasy genre is still going strong in fifty years when I get my first manuscript finished…

The Periodic Table of Storytelling
This is quite and interesting (and addictive) little gem. I had a bit of fun clicking around and checking out different Elements. I love the Handwaving element (WAV), even if some of the examples (Harry Potter example in the Films – Live Action portion) are a bit out of context, it is still quite useful to have so many readily available examples at your fingertips.

10 Things About Rough Drafts that I Learned From My First Novel by Emily Wenstrom at TheWritePractice.com
An encouraging reminder post of just how important a first draft is, and how much works comes after the milestone. My biggest is has always been, and will always be, Emily’s Rule #3 – A Rough Draft is a Hot Mess. I am very critical of my words, even in the free-write or zero draft stage. I will rewrite sentences over a few times and lose the train of thought I was on. It is my Achilles Heel and I struggle to find a breakthrough for it. If you have any advice on how to let the self-editor take the day off, please post them in the comments below.

Discovery

I had a conversation recently with a great friend who was feeding my tidbits of inspiration for the short story I wrote for the #shortstorychallenge put on my www.nycmidnight.com. I was discussing a possible flood scene that would wipe out a city and she told me it reminded her of Thistle, Utah. I’ve never heard of the city (I’ve only lived in Utah for 5 years) and she proceeded to tell me about a massive flood and subsequent landslide which effectively razed an entire city. Because I am such a visual person, she pulled up some Google Images of Thistle and, to my great astonishment, it is a place that I drive through every time we visit my in-laws. The mostly submerged, dilapidated houses have sparked many thoughts of potential stories and I have always wanted to stop and explore some of the ruins up close. I am fascinated by these types of places and love to learn about unique and quirky local histories as inspiration. When I get to my worldbuilding post about a city called The Stilts and the history of how it came eto be, you can bet there will be elements of Thistle, Utah included.

I hope you have a great week of writing and reading about writing. If you have any interesting articles to share, please do so in the comments below. As always, please subscribe to my blog via the widget on the right sidebar and make sure to follow me on Twitter.